10 curriculum changes we made in 2022 to achieve our holy grail

BY edie abraham-Macht

Recently, I was decluttering my childhood bedroom and found a plethora of high school notebooks. I was shocked by how little of the information, which I had once seen as vital to capture, looked familiar to me. I’m only 22, but I found myself cleaning old notes out of my desk (biology, geometry, world history) years after the knowledge had already been cleaned out of my mind. 

I’m guessing I’m not alone in this experience: in a typical high school class, the content you’ve learned quickly fades.

Imagine finding old notes and, rather than frowning over long-forgotten details, marveling at the strong foundation your education gave you: “I’ve learned so much more about this topic since high school!” This is our holy grail at Kaleidoscope: designing courses where the learning continues to compound after a class ends. 

We work toward this by crafting courses that connect to the real world—both conceptually and practically—and give students space to apply what they’re learning. We believe that this enables students to build robust mental files that they can continue to add to for years down the line.

To this end, we’ve made—and will continue to make—a number of curriculum design changes based on student and teacher feedback and our own insights from seeing our classes in action. As 2022 comes to a close, we’d like to share the 10 biggest changes we’ve made this year as a result of this ongoing learning process.

Growth Area #1: Better Supporting Students

  1. Building foundational knowledge with concept lists: Although we’ve always shared a list of “key concepts, enduring understandings, and disciplinary skills” for each unit with teachers, we’re now creating student-facing concept lists. Each concept list has two versions: a list without definitions to distribute at the beginning of a unit, and a list with definitions to distribute at the end. Since our courses don’t use textbooks, this provides a centralized place for students to take notes on definitions and examples of concepts as they learn them throughout the unit. They can then use the list with definitions to fill in any gaps in their conceptual knowledge as they prepare for assessment tasks. 

  2. Creating purposeful launches and closings: This past year, we have revised many of our launches and closings to more tightly pursue lesson and class objectives, often while building community. Far from optional add-ons to get students talking to each other, strong launches and closings are the threads that string the lessons together into a meaningful arc. This means that the best launches and closings work towards many goals at once: for example, we created an icebreaker based on psychological principles of connection to use on the first days of all of our classes that is rigorous, research-backed, and an opportunity for students to build meaningful connections with each other while learning about the science behind connection. 

  3. Upgrading our approach to teaching nonfiction texts: Our Social Sciences for Social Problems course has long included an activity on how to read nonfiction texts that repeats in each unit and gradually releases responsibility to students. But we’ve learned that the wide variety of nonfiction books we use require further differentiated approaches. For example, a narrative nonfiction book is generally easier to access, whereas a textbook-style nonfiction book is generally more challenging. Thus, students benefit from varying levels and forms of support to approach different kinds of books. For this reason, we’ve added even more activities to help students understand how nonfiction books work, and therefore how to read them chapter by chapter. Our goal is for students to start understanding the construction of each chapter, which then helps them more efficiently process the information (e.g., the author will make a summary argument, then delve into three case studies before summarizing his argument more forcefully). This change is motivated by the firm belief that how students read is just as important, if not more important, for college preparation than what they read.

  4. Scaffolding assessment tasks with key skills: In the anthropology unit of our Social Sciences for Social Problems course, students write an ethnography—a close anthropological study—of a group of their choice. Student and teacher feedback taught us that while students consistently loved this assessment task, they needed more support—beginning earlier in the unit and continuing throughout—to learn key skills like how to take field notes, identify and organize key points from these notes, and turn them into a piece with a coherent argument. While our initial approach to exposing students to anthropological research methods in action was certainly helpful, we needed to teach additional skills to help students produce higher-quality work. It’s always been a concern of ours that high school assessments are over-scaffolded, resulting in students being unprepared for generally un-scaffolded college assessments. But we feel good about adding skill scaffolding because the skills we teach will help students on a wide variety of tasks going forward, rather than simply giving them a how-to set of instructions to get an ‘A’ on a particular assessment. 

Growth Area #2: Better Supporting Teachers

  1. Taking a “less is more” approach to pedagogical instructions. Although some pedagogical guidance is crucial to include in curricula—for example, how to lead an effective seminar-style discussion—we’ve found that leaner lesson plans keep the focus on what’s most important for teachers. Rather than getting bogged down in unnecessary details that teachers are likely better-suited to decide based on their students’ needs—Small group or pair-and-share? Five minutes or eight on this activity?—we’re now working to ensure that our lesson plans emphasize the key texts, activities, and goals of each lesson, and how and why these all fit together. The more we take away, the more that remains.

  2. Clarifying the purpose of each lesson: Each of our lesson plans includes a purpose statement at the beginning, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the day’s activities. Although these statements have always been part of our lesson plans, we have been taking steps to ensure that each and every one of them clearly and concisely emphasizes the goal of the lesson, both on its own and in connection with the larger objectives of the unit and class. 

Growth Area #3: Being More “Kaleidoscope”

  1. Crafting pre-post surveys to measure growth in transfer to action: When designing assessment tasks—writing an ethnography, creating a policy proposal—our goal is to measure growth in student knowledge. But our holy grail is to equip students with useful knowledge. So this year, we standardized the practice of creating pre- and post-surveys for our classes in order to also measure growth in application. By administering these identical surveys on the first and last days of class, we can discover: What concrete concepts, strategies, and lessons have students learned that they are now able to apply to their lives? How have our classes improved their ability to do well and do good in the world?

  2. Weaving in humanistic depth to social sciences education: Although most of our curricula center on the social sciences, we’ve come to believe that the humanities are far from a separate endeavor. Rather, they are a reflection and expression of human desires and foibles, and thus insights from the humanities have the potential to enrich every academic subject. We’re adding humanistic touches to each one of our units: in Identity & Prejudice, for example, we use the poem Identity by A.R. Ammons to prompt students to explore conceptions and conflicts of identity within the psychological and humanistic traditions. Students’ newfound knowledge about the psychology of identity allows them to deeply analyze the poem, and the presence of the poem allows them to go beyond a strictly psychological perspective in considering identity. With this change, we hope that students come away from our classes with an understanding of the multifaceted, inherently interdisciplinary nature of human knowledge. 

  3. Adding depth and rigor to the last days of class: In the past, we’ve regarded the last day of class as an opportunity for students to share and reflect on what they’ve learned—and to celebrate finally being done! Although we still see value in these components, we’re adding an engaging synthesis activity into every last day so that our classes remain academically rigorous even as they come to a close. For example, on the last day of our 10-day Social Sciences for Social Problems course, students analyze famous photographs using the prompt: What questions would social scientists from any of the six disciplines we’ve discussed ask about this image? Once students generate responses (for example, an anthropologist might ask about the significance of hand gestures in a photograph of a family being reunited at the US-Mexico border), we ask them to dig deeper into why particular social scientists would ask particular questions and what this says about the unique, and yet intertwined, contributions of each discipline to analyzing real-world problems. 

  4. Continuing to tighten the connectedness of our curricula: Whether within individual lessons, units, or entire classes, we’ve been tirelessly working to ensure that the components of our curricula interlock like puzzle pieces, working towards a well-articulated set of goals. We recognize that as curriculum designers, we have the bandwidth and visibility to create these tight connections in a way that even the best teachers do not. A recent example: our Social Sciences for Social Problems framing lessons, which occur at the very beginning and very end of the course, now both ask students to engage with the Declaration of Independence. Our goal with this change? To measure how both the content and disciplinary knowledge students acquire in the course transforms their understanding of this foundational articulation of American values.

While these changes are highly effortful for us, we want students to remember what really matters years after they graduate high school—and creating streamlined, engaging, and tightly woven curricula is how we work towards this goal.

Helpful links: